Learning is different from Fixing

John Allspaw summarizes some useful information and advice, mostly from Ryan Kitchens' "learning from incidents" web site. 

Kill Switch by Joel Shepherd (Cassandra Kresnov book 3)

The stories are starting to grow on me a little bit but I still prefer Shepherd's other "Spiral Wars" universe.  The Kresnov universe's third book has some space combat but a weak plot ending, 4/5 Stars.

Make vaccines great again!

David Brin opened his latest missive with this story about the "Asian Flu" of 1957:

"Maurice Hilleman, a doctor later regarded as the godfather of vaccines, in 1957 read about a nasty flu outbreak in Hong Kong that mentioned glassy-eyed children at a clinic, tipping him off that these deaths meant the next big flu pandemic." Hilleman requested samples of the virus be shipped to U.S. drugmakers right away so they could get a vaccine ready. Though 70,000 people in the United States ultimately died, "some predicted that the U.S. death toll would have reached 1 million without the vaccine that Hilleman called for... Health officials widely credited that vaccine with saving many lives." 

Dwight Eisenhower was the president. The "Greatest Generation" admired science and expertise. The most celebrated and popular American at the time was named Jonas Salk. Let's all make America that kind of great again.

I agree!

Bone Silence by Alastair Reynolds

I prefer Reynolds' other SF series to this gritty steam punk universe.  However the story and writing are fun, 3/5 stars.

SARS-CoV-2 vaccine booster will become part of annual flu shot

ArsTech has a great summary of this interesting model and analysis of what will happen in future years, as COVID19 becomes part of our annual "flu season."

Over-reaction causing more deaths, not just wealth destruction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3xEOcJ3YUw

Professor John Leannidis from Stanford explains why our current policies are causing many more deaths globally than a science-based, rational response would cause.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3xEOcJ3YUw

Tilt now has plugin extensions

Tilt is a fun, nifty development tool for your development environment for systems with a complex set of microservices.  Watch this 100-second video to get a quick overview.  Tilt recently released an open-source extensions library and is soliciting more extensions.

collecting metrics and monitoring Kafka functionality and performance

If you (or your management) has made the mistake of ignoring the various "Kafka as a service" public cloud offerings by standing up your own Kafka clusters, or, (heaven forfend!) your organization has actually forked Kafka and runs some variation of Kafka, this series of articles from DataDog will be of great interest:  Collecting Kafka Metrics and Monitoring Kafka.

Go vs Rust programming for Kubernetes

Taylor Thomas takes us on a fun comparison of coding in Rust vs coding in Go for Kubernetes tools development.  As a Rust language learner, I can validate the exponentially-difficult learning curve and as a curious Dev-Ops observer, I can also verify the wealth and maturity of GoLang tools and libraries for Kubernetes. 

Autoscaling kubernetes on AWS in batch & interactive workloads

Vlad takes us on an interesting measurement journey into alternatives for minimizing your public cloud computing costs while also maximizing your customers' delight with your low-latency service by auto-scaling your kubernetes services more effectively using Fargate.

He links to this talk by Claire Liguori on interactive workloads.

Among the (very-many) disadvantages of on-premise systems at old stodgy companies is that the sunk costs of hardware and data centers cannot easily be flexibly allocated and "charged back" to the consuming entities within the company.  On the public cloud, if vendor-autoscaling causes some latency or over-provisioning for a few minutes, you can use a serverless solution like Fargate to reduce the waste and customer pain.